A new Life for Easter baskets

The other night, my husband and I were enjoying some quiet time together on our back patio, each of us enjoying our respective drinks. The warm summer breeze was rustling the leaves in the trees, and we could hear the crickets chirping.. Ahh what a perfect evening.. The all of a sudden out of the blue, he says:

“You gotta do something about those easter baskets in the trunk of the car.”

Me: “Oh yeah. I forgot all about those! I had nowhere to put them, that’s why I left them there.”

Him: “Well you need to get rid of them, because they remember me at the grocery store now because of them. I’m that guy with the easter baskets in the trunk.”

Well leave it to me to be remembered for oddities like that. So since I couldn’t bring myself to throw perfectly good baskets in the trash, I decided they just needed a little bit of sprucing up. So I put my old t shirt on and got my cans of krylon out and decided to spray paint them instead.

Here is what they looked like before I began.

I didn’t want to have those long handles, because ultimately I knew I wanted to use these as storage baskets. To get the handle off without breaking up the basket. All I did was get between the glue and the basket handle with my finger to loosen it up on either side.

And out it came

I decided to try a couple of different colors, because I didn’t know how well the paint would cover those bright easter colors. I really wanted white to be the color i’d use, but it was not covering as well as I hoped, so blue became second best.

I let it dry overnight and I didn’t stop there because I thought they would look best with a fabric liner specially made for it. I looked in my fabric stash and found a cool orange print I loved against the blue basket.

Making it was pretty simple, all I did was measure out the depth of the basket, shape the fabric into a large oval and sewed on an elastic band. First, I positioned it on the wrong side of the fabric, and traced out the opening with chalk.

Then I measured the depth of the basket to find my next measurement. My depth was 4″.

So I measured out 5″ (4″ depth + 1″ seam allowance) from my original traced outline. I did this all around, and connected the dots to create what looks like a big donut.

Then I cut it out.

So to find out how much elastic I needed, all I did was wrap a piece around the basket being sure that it was a snug fit, marked it, and sniped it off. I sewed the ends together using a zigzag stitch.

Once I had the elastic ends stitched together, it was time to attach it to the fabric. I always pin elastic to the fabric, so the elastic is evenly spaced out. 1 pin at 12:00, 3:00. 6:00, 9:00. I also pinned in between each of those as well.

Then I sewed using a zig zag stitch, while simultaneously pulling both sides of the elastic taut while I sewed.

When you’re done, it should look like a large shower cap

Then I popped it into the basket to see how it looks.

And there we go! A new life for these easter baskets as storage containers.